In any industry, customers running critical applications are typically slow to move to something new. Whether it is a new technology, platform, application, or service provider, people tend to be comfortable with the status quo and it is human nature to try to avoid a “CNN moment” or a resume generating bad decision resulting from implementing something new ->thus, people tend to avoid making changes to their critical workload environment. However, as new solutions or technologies become available and mature, the “I don’t want to be first” mantra is eventually followed by “Oh-oh- looks like I am last” when the realization you are falling behind your competition (who have already adopted the new technology) starts to set in. Finding that point in time when a new technology- solution-product has reached an adequate state of maturity to meet your particular needs and requirements is paramount when considering changes to a critical workload environment.

My brush with being a part of a “CNN moment” was from my past life in the Telco world (circa early 2000’s)- Read More »

Enterprise IT continues to spend nearly $15B of their hard-earned budgets every year in RISC/UNIX and mainframe hardware. The upfront expense combined with the proprietary lock-in on these platforms and associated maintenance and licensing costs is a mandate for IT to rethink their long term strategy. Many of these companies are already moving off the RISC/UNIX architectures due to high costs and uncertainty about their futures foreshadowed by missed deadlines, changes in roadmaps and discontinued hardware and software support. There is a strong and on-going market trend to migrate from proprietary architectures to the open Intel Xeon® based architecture, and the Cisco Unified Computing System is particularly well suited as a target platform for this purpose. In partnership with Intel, Cisco has developed a RISC/UNIX Migration Program (www.cisco.com/go/migratetoucs) that includes a complete set of Cisco Migration Services through Cisco AS and Partners to help IT organizations define and realize the business benefits of migrating to Cisco Unified Computing System.

I had a conversation recently with Patrick Buddenbaum , Director of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, and Cisco’s Scott Clark, VP, Enterprise DC Services, to discuss the RISC/UNIX migration program. Read on for a summary of this conversation.

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